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'Great Wave' depicted in Hokusai’s masterpiece recreated by scientists

For nearly 200 years, Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa has inspired wonder partly because the event it depicts, a towering freak wave, has defied scientific explanation.

Now, a team at Oxford and Edinburgh universities claim to have laid the mystery to rest by successfully creating one for themselves - and it looks remarkably similar.

The achievement is being hailed as a significant breakthrough because, so far, meteorologists and sailors have had no means of predicting the likelihood of violent waves that are unexpectedly large compared to their surroundings.

Indeed, the phenomenon was first scientifically measured only in 1995, when a freak wave hit the Draupner drilling platform in the North Sea.

Using an artificial wave-making pool, the researchers created two wave groups, varying the angle at which they met.

At roughly 120 degrees, freak waves occurred.

Wave systems crossed each other at 120 degrees - Credit: Oxford University
Wave systems crossed each other at 120 degrees Credit: Oxford University

When waves are not crossing, wave breaking limits the height that a wave can achieve, but when waves cross at large angles, breaking behaviour changes and no longer limits the height a wave can achieve in the same manner, the researchers said.

“The measurement of the Draupner wave in 1995 was a seminal observation initiating many years of research into the physics of freak waves and shifting their standing from mere folklore to a credible real-world phenomenon,” said Dr Mark McAllister, from the University of Oxford.

“By recreating the Draupner wave in the lab we have moved one step closer to understanding the potential mechanisms of this phenomenon.”

The team said the wave they created bore an uncanny resemblance to the famous Hokusai print, which depicts an enormous wave towering over three boats with Mount Fuji in the background.

'Uncannily similar': Hokusai's 'Great Wave' and that created in the lab - Credit: Oxford University
'Uncannily similar': Hokusai's 'Great Wave' and that created in the lab Credit: Oxford University

The 37 by 25 cm picture is of a series entitled Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which completed between 1829 and 1833.

The experiment was conducted at the University of Edinburgh’s FloWave Ocean Energy Research facility, a circular wave-current basin.

“This unique capability enables waves to be generated from any direction, which has allowed us to experimentally recreate the complex directional wave conditions we believe to be associated with the Draupner wave event,” said Dr Sam Draycott, from Edinburgh.

The wave measured using laser technology in 1995 partially damaged the drilling platform off the coast of Norway.

Prior to that incident, only anecdotal evidence for rogue waves existed.